Dr. Roberta Miller hits the road at 8 a.m. to see her patients.
Many are too old or sick to go to the doctor. So the doctor comes to them.
She's put 250,000 miles on her Honda minivan going to their homes in upstate New York. Home visits make a different kind of care possible.
"You can evaluate the person as a whole," says Miller, who has been a home care physician in Schenectady, N.Y., for more than 20 years. "You see everything that influences their health and well-being: the environment, the surrounding people, the support system, whether they had or didn't have food."
Miller spends about an hour at each house call. Conversation with patients and their family members flows so naturally that it's easy to miss that she's also checking vital signs, gently stretching a hand, noting which pill bottles are empty.
[For more of this story, written by Misha Friedman, go to http://www.npr.org/2015/11/08/...en-even-by-neighbors]
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